‘Ellen O’Leary 1831–1889’ (1891), in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, ed. Alfred H. Miles (1892)

Abstract

Miss O’Leary, the Fenian poet, belongs to a type of writers better known in Ireland than in England. Her verses are songs and ballads in the old sense of the word rather than poems and lyrics. Living in a country where the populace are strongly moved by great fundamental passions, she was able to find an audience for her tender and simple rhymes. The streets of her native Tipperary have echoed more than once to some ballad of hers about emigrants and their sorrows, or like theme, sung by the ballad-singers from their little strips of fluttering paper. The Commercial Journal, The Irishman, and the Fenian organ The Irish People,¹ helped also to spread her verse through the country. Her poetry, and the poetry of Casey, and Kickham’s Sally Cavanagh† and his three or four ballads, made up, indeed, the whole literary product of the Fenian agitation.² ‘Young Ireland’ days had brought their reaction of silence.³ Simple verse could still, however, find an audience; as it, indeed, always can in Ireland, where the ballad age has not yet gone by. It may be that a troubled history and the smouldering unrest of agitation and conspiracy are good for the making of ballads. If this be so, Miss O’Leary lived amid surroundings of an ideal kind, for all her life she was deep in the councils of Fenianism.